transcript

David Morris's article in the Virgina Quarterly Review

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MARCO WERMAN: Not many people know where the US government picked up those harsh interrogation techniques – techniques now commonly referred to as torture – but there are clear links to a Pentagon program called “SERE.” That's an acronym for “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape.” It's supposed to help military personnel learn how to cope with capture, interrogation, and torture. David Morris went through the SERE program as a Marine in the 1990s. He's just written an article for Slate.com on what that experience was like.

DAVID MORRIS: They hooded us. They threw a hood over my head, put us into small cells about three-foot by three-foot. Kept us up for a couple of days, subjected us to some loud music and babies wailing, and you know, no food, no water for the better part of two days. So you can imagine what that does to your mental state.

WERMAN: Yeah. I mean, you actually write that you thought at one point that you actually had been captured and were a prisoner.

MORRIS: Yeah. It was a real – you know, as you can imagine, a really surreal experience. There was a point in time when it became unclear to me that I was no longer in a training exercise, and I thought for a while that maybe we had crossed over into some sort of shadow land where this was, you know, this was a real-world experience and I was in a real functioning prisoner of war camp.

WERMAN: Let me ask you this. Did you see any waterboarding while you were in the SERE program?

MORRIS: Yeah. There was a sailor that was in the program with me that was waterboarded about a foot away from me. And I couldn't look at him because I was strapped to a board myself, presumably in preparation to be waterboarded myself. But it was a rather – you know, it was a rather horrific experience just because, you know, long story short, I forgot my prisoner number on several occasions, and this sailor was waterboarded to pay for my mistake. I very clearly saw them, you know, the garden hose being picked up and listened to this sailor choke for the better part of a minute as he was being waterboarded.

WERMAN: So the people who run this program take it very seriously, it sounds like.

MORRIS: It's pretty frightening. It's – they – there were some of the instructors that seemed to be enjoying it to a certain extent, and they, you know, as a dramatic experience they very realistically recreate what a Prisoner Of War camp is like, or what it was like. And it was, you know, something I'll never forget, that's for sure.

WERMAN: It seems kind of like a psychological version of “Friendly Fire.” Why allow your own soldiers to be tortured in the first place? What do they actually gain from this experience?

MORRIS: Well, the idea was – and it's not an unsound idea – is that you want to inoculate our servicemen against this sort of exploitation by the enemy. You know, this school was created in response to propaganda films and confessions -- false confessions that were made by prisoners of war in Korea and Vietnam. So it was – it started out as a very effective program and in some ways continues to be an effective program. But at some point, beginning particularly after 9/11, it began – instead of being just a purely defensive program to train and inoculate our own troops, began to be used offensively against detainees that had been taken by US servicemen.

WERMAN: What is the evidence you found that the interrogators actually went to Guantanamo and used torture?

MORRIS: It's outlined very clearly in a series of government reports. The Levin Report Senate Investigation, which was just released last year. The Pentagon's inspector general for intelligence outlines this. It's an official document that's been declassified. It outlines this in excruciating detail.

WERMAN: Do you believe the SERE school, the SERE program should be dropped completely?

MORRIS: Well, something needs to -- there needs to be some training made available for US servicemen to learn to survive and resist interrogation. But it's important to remember that the SERE school program has its origin in the Korea War, and these Communist mind-manipulation techniques that really aren't relevant in the war on terror or in any foreseeable situation today. And I think the curriculum needs to be dropped and a new more relevant program, more relevant curriculum needs to be created to replace it.

WERMAN: It's interesting. You said that part of the idea of this is to kind of inoculate soldiers against what they would see or might experience in the battlefield. Do you think in some strange way it's inoculated or maybe immunized Americans to, you know, what torture means?

MORRIS: Yeah, I think it's had an inadvertent effect. I think when you are abused and when it's done under the guise of training, I think it makes you a little callous to how horrible torture can be and how horrible interrogation can be. And I think because thousands and thousands of servicemen go through this school, I think it has, you know, unintentionally kind of put the message out there that torture and abuse is something that's acceptable.

WERMAN: David Morris is a writer for Slate and as a Marine, attended the military's “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape” training course in the 1990s. Thank you very much for your time.

MORRIS: Thanks for having me.

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